Endemic gun violence in the United States became too visible
again in the mass shooting in Las Vegas on Sunday. The regularity with
which these tragedies are unfolding in the United States is shocking.
When even the senseless murder of twenty children in the 2012 Sandy Hook
Elementary School shooting was not enough to shake up the
lawmakers in Congress, what will? It is almost certain that the members of
Congress who are beholden to the gun lobby will fall silent again
("now is not the time to talk about gun control")
and pretend that nothing is wrong with gun laws in the United Sates.
As Steve Israel put it in the New York Times eloquently,
Nothing Will Change After the Las Vegas Shooting.
Canadians cannot stand silent on this matter: four of the
people killed in Las Vegas were Canadian visitors.
A Globe and Mail editorial on
October 4 described it as: "The wrong thing to do would be to throw up our hands and say, Evil exists, so there's nothing we can do."

Even if the U.S. remains espoused to its Second Amendment rights,
there is a big difference between laissez-faire gun ownership and
responsible gun ownership. Even the wildest gun enthusiast in the
U.S. should realize that civilians do not need automatic weapons—and
this ought to include semi-automatic weapons that can be modified with
(legal) add-ons into quasi-automatic weapons, as happened in Las Vegas.
With the election of the Trump administration, it is even less likely that
anything will happen to curb gun violence south of the border. In
comparison to Canada, the homicide and gun violence rate in the United
States is astoundingly high. Yet, there are some in the United States
who argue that the high rate of gun violence is nothing exceptional in
international comparisons. They are wrong, and here is the empirical
justification why they are wrong. Sadly, the U.S. is a case of exceptionalism
when it comes to gun violence.

Gun advocates argue that the United States is nowhere near
the top of the list of countries with high homicide rates.
Technically, that statement is correct. I have looked at
the intentional homicide rates per 100,000 people reported
in the World Development Indicators. Using the latest available
year (2014, in some cases a year or two earlier), the United
States ranks 85th out of 166. Honduras tops the list with 74.6
homicides per 100,000 people, an astounding 19 times higher than
in the United States, and 53 times higher than in Canada.
El Salvador, Venezuela, Jamaica, and South Africa are, sadly,
not far behind Honduras. Yet, the comparison with the U.S.
is inappropriate. It is necessary to control for the stage
of social development and the sophistication of legal institutions.
Economists routinely use per-capita GDP to proxy for these.

The World Bank data on intentional homicides includes all
methods of murder, by gun or otherwise. On the other hand, the
intentional homicide rate under-report deaths attributable to
guns, because such deaths include accidents and suicides.
The diagram below is a double-logarithmic plot of homicide
rates against per-capita GDP. There is a strong negative relationship.
As countries grow richer and develop better institutions
(including policing), murder rates fall dramatically. Keep in
mind that the vertical scale is logarithmic and distances show
proportions, not levels. Countries with a population of less
than one million were excluded, as well as countries with
rates of 0.2 or less (due to rounding, these numbers may be
less accurate).

The green regression line suggests that
as countries develop from the very left to the very right of the
diagram, murder rates drop by a factor of ten—an order
of magnitude. Yet, there is much scattering even when controlling
for income. Countries such as China and Indonesia have low
murder rates, while richer Brazil, Mexico, and Russia have
enormously high murder rates. Among the very rich countries,
most have very low rates (Norway, Switzerland, Japan). Only
Quatar (with a population of 2 million) and the United States
stand out as countries clearly above the green line.

click on image for high-resolution PDF image

‘The argument that gun violence in the U.S. is nothing exceptional by international standards is demonstrably false after
controlling for the level of socio-economic development.’

Looking at the above diagram, it may appear that
the U.S. is not all that special with a high homicide rate.
That impression is false, because the comparison needs to
focus on countries of similar social and economic development.
Let us therefore
focus on the appropriate peer group of
OECD countries, mostly affluent countries, and open societies
and democracies. Among these
countries there remains a strong negative relationship between per-capita GDP
and homicide rates. Yet, there are two outliers that hover far above
the green line: Mexico on the left, and the United States on the right
(shown in red). Both countries have significant problems with gun violence,
for different reasons. So here it becomes clear that the United
States are special compared to its peers.

A technical note on the two regressions. The estimated elasticities
in the two diagrams are –0.34 for all countries and –0.77 for the
OECD countries. Both coefficients are highly significant statistically.
The R-squares are 0.19 and 0.32, respectively.

click on image for high-resolution PDF image

On the left of the above diagram we still find a good number of
countries with relatively poor economies. Let us move one step further
and limit the peer group to countries that are at least half as rich
as the United States as measured by GDP per capita. Arguably, the
poorer countries among the OECD members have significantly weaker
institutions. Then rank the remaining countries in descending
order. The United States appears, sadly, at the very top of the list,
far ahead of all others when shown on a linear scale. The homicide
rate in the United States is roughly three times as large as in
Canada, four times as large as in Germany, and nearly eight times as
large as in Switzerland.

click on image
for high-resolution PDF image

The argument that gun violence in the United States is nothing
exceptional by international standards is demonstrably false after
controlling for the level of socio-economic development. Or do
the pundits in the U.S. who point to other countries really want
to compare the U.S. with Russia, Brazil, and Mexico?
The U.S. has a big problem, but no sense of urge to deal with it. The
hyper-partisan gun lobby has much to answer for the failure of
legislators to enact measures to ensure responsible gun ownership, but
its actions are only part of the picture. The bigger problem is that
many Americans have deluded themselves into thinking that gun ownership
protects them from crime, and that gun ownership is the essential and
indispensable guarantee of freedom and liberty. Gun ownership
in the United States has morphed into a quasi-religion, and no
amount of scientific evidence is allowed to dispute the tenet
of unrestricted gun ownership.

As mentioned earlier,
the numbers shown in the table above mask a large part of the
actual gun violence.
Intentional homicides are only one part of the total number of gun
deaths, which are about 10.5 per 100,000 (and includes suicides and
accidents) rather than the 3.9 shown in the diagram (which includes
murder by other means than guns). The rate of gun homicides per
100,000 is about 3.4. In 2014, about 33,600 people lost their lives
due to gun violence in the United States (gunpolicy.org). If
the U.S. was more like Canada, that number would drop by 27,000!

So what are sensible policies to curb gun violence in the United
States? We know what responsible ownership looks like. We exercise
this responsibility for motor vehicles. Drivers get trained and
licensed. Vehicles are registered and insured to cover
liability. Police patrol our streets to ensure compliance with our
traffic rules. Grave offenders lose their driver's license or have
their vehicle impounded for some time. Operators of special vehicles
require special training and licenses. Vehicles are equipped with
safety features such as seat belts and air bags and infant
seats. Vehicles are parked in ventilated garages to prevent fumes from
entering buildings. We don't let our kids drive cars, and we keep the
keys in a safe place. And we collect taxes on motor fuels to cover
other negative externalities. Translate all of that one by one to gun
ownership. Now, if politicians in Washington were truly
concerned about the welfare of their constituents, they would
act. Those who don't are morally complicit in the deaths of the
innocent victims of gun violence. They put allegiance to a powerful
lobby group, or their fealty to the tenets of their quasi-religion,
over the welfare of the citizens they are elected to represent.

Canada's gun laws are mostly sensbile, but not perfect either.
There are clear categories for "non-restricted", "restricted", and
"prohibited" firearms, and the latter two require registrations.
Individuals need to obtain a firearms license
before they can purchase a gun, or keep one in possession.
Applicants have to complete a safety training course and
pass security screening. There is a 28-day waiting period for
first-time applicants. Non-restriced firearms include hunting
rifles and shotguns, while virtually all handguns are restricted.
Unfortunately, the lax laws in the U.S. have implications for
Canada, as illegal weapons are smuggled across the border
(see the Washington Post article
Canadians crack down on guns, alarmed by flow from U.S., February 2016), or are brought across by US visitors who are woefully ignorant of Canadian law (see Macleans magazinze Americans trying to bring guns into Canada with 'alarming frequency', August 2017).
The RCMP reports that the illicit firearms market in Canada
is supplied primarily by smuggled
firearms, particularly handguns, from the United States. Our Canadian
homicide rate could be lower than it is today, if it wasn't for the fact
that easy availability of handguns in the United trickles across our border.
The federal government in Ottawa is promising to take sensible steps to enhance responsible
gun ownership in Canada, and crack down on gun smuggling into Canada.
Perhaps the best that Canadians can do is
to show our southern neighbour that there is a better way when it
comes to gun onwership, a way that puts safety first.